'The birth of the London club scene': Bowie Nights at Billy's Club – in pictures

Before the new romantics of the 1980s, there were the Blitz kids and before the Blitz kids, there were Bowie nights at Billy's nightclub in Soho, London. The year was 1978 and a grotty subterranean club, beneath a brothel, was about to be commandeered every Tuesday evening by an unruly mob of teenagers – suburban art-school students mainly – who had become disillusioned with punk.

Some of the regulars would go on to become famous – Boy George (then plain George O'Dowd), Marilyn, DJ Jeremy Healy, Siobhan Fahey from Bananarama – and collectively they would hash out a freaky, glamorous aesthetic that would dominate the next decade.

These pictures were taken by Nicola Tyson, an 18-year-old student at the Chelsea School of Art at the time, who has since gone on to find renown as a painter

Julia Fodor (DJ Princess Julia) and George O'Dowd (Boy George), 1978. Nicola Tyson: 'Billy’s was the birth of the London club scene and people expressing themselves through their clothes, hair and make-up. You can almost feel that in the photographs: "Look what I’m wearing this week." There weren’t really any rules, apart from push your look as far as you can. Invent yourself. Entertain.'

'This must be really early on: it’s Peter Robinson (Marilyn), Julia Fodor (Princess Julia) and George O’Dowd (Boy George). The DJ at Billy’s would either be Rusty Egan or a girl who was the house DJ. When it was Rusty, the music would be Kraftwerk, the Normal, Bowie, Roxy Music, Giorgio Moroder soundtracks, all sorts. Bowie was a strong influence – even during punk – so the younger generation weren’t finished with that; we wanted to have our own go at him. And with the house DJ we’d all be dancing to Sylvester and the disco hits of the day. There wasn’t any snobbery, all of that music was loved.'

'Peter Robinson [in the middle] was in his transition phase to becoming Marilyn. Over the weeks of Bowie Nights, you see him changing his spiky hairdo into his Marilyn hair. The girl he’s about to kiss in this picture is called Kate. Peter was only 16 when it was taken. Like most of the people at Billy’s, we were the fans who had been too young to participate in any big way in the punk thing. Once it went mainstream we were craving that excitement, because it hadn’t lasted very long, so there was this real need to start a scene to carry on that thrill.'

'This is Siobhan Fahey [on the right] and her friend. Siobhan was a fashion journalist and Bananarama started the next year, in 1979. I didn’t really know her; she wasn’t a regular at Billy’s. I would just go and take photographs of cool-looking people and then I would bring my snaps back the following week and ask people if they wanted to buy them, so I could get my beer money. I forget how much I charged; it might have been 30p per snap, which was not cheap then. It wasn’t very successful, because a lot of times the photographs would be snatched from me, passed round very excitedly and only half of them would come back.'

'Steve Strange [on the right] was 19 in this photograph but he had already been in a couple of bands – the Moors Murderers and the Photons – and not long after he would form Visage with Rusty and Midge Ure. His outfit, and that of the girl* next to him, probably came from a store called PX, which had just opened on James Street in Covent Garden. Steve worked there for a couple of years and it became the unofficial house designer for the scene – if you could afford it. For everyone else, you had to make your own.' [*Helen Robinson, designer and owner of PX in James Street]

'Jeremy Healy [on the left] looks so young in this picture. He’s actually 16 and it looks like he’s come straight from school in his uniform. I’ve got a picture of him a year later and he’s completely made up, with huge hair and platform shoes, and he’s DJing. Next to him is Andy Polaris, who went on to be the singer of Animal Nightlife. His look also really changed: in the later photographs, he’s wearing a trilby and sharp suit. That was the thing about Bowie Nights: it was experimental, everyone did their own thing and by the end of the year it had coalesced into a coherent way of dressing.'

'Martin Degville, who went on to be lead singer of Sigue Sigue Sputnik, was someone who had his look totally together already. He’s from Walsall, so this must have been the night when the Birmingham crowd came down. George had strong links to Birmingham – some of his family lived up there and around this time he shared a flat with Martin in Walsall for a year – so he must have put them on to Billy’s. But it’s interesting how few Londoners there are; most of us were coming from somewhere in the suburbs and – like the punks before us – we’d be on public transport going to a nightclub as all the drunks were going home.'

Picture left to right are Unknown, the photographer Nicola Tyson and George O'Dowd, better known as Boy George, 1978. 'I didn’t become a hardcore member of the Blitz scene, because that required massive dedication to a look that I wasn’t into,' Tyson says. 'I just liked wearing men’s clothing; I was a suit-and-tie dyke. I kept the crazy shit in my head; that came out in painting later.'